Today's futuristic but still lovably parochial column looks forward excitedly to the 2017 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge. At that event the Australian National University (and so in a sense our city) will be represented by the impossibly lean and lithe vehicle whose portrait you see decorating today's column.
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It will be the first time a Canberra team of any kind has entered a contraption in the famous biennial event in which teams from many countries design, build and drive solar electric vehicles from Darwin to Adelaide, a distance of 3022km.
Many of the teams that compete come from universities and in 2017 the tournament will include the ANU's Sol Invictus (Invincible Sun) team. Sol Invictus describes itself, in its enthusiastic literature, as the "Australian National University's flagship interdisciplinary student-led team."
The Sol Invictus team advises that "the biennial Challenge is rightly regarded as one of the world's most prestigious solar racing competitions, and with good reason".
"Teams must design and construct cars with the aim of completing the race with the highest average speed, using sunlight and recovered kinetic energy as their only sources of fuel. The route passes through through some of the Australian Outback's harshest environments.
"The race attracts competitors from many fields, ranging from universities through to technical institutes and private enterprises. This high calibre of competition helps to attract significant global media attention to the WSC. But the WSC is also so much more than just a race. It is an exhibition of sustainability-driven innovation, where cutting-edge solar technologies are on display for all to see. In fact, average speeds of up to 100km/h have been maintained for the duration of the entire race, in some cases using less energy than your coffee maker."
Sol Invictus is really beginning to trundle now, with a major event at the ANU last Friday evening, an "inaugural networking and sponsorship night". Stars that studded the night included, as well as representatives of all sorts of companies that may sponsor the project and contribute expertise to it, the Chief Minister Andrew Barr and the Vice Chancellor of the ANU, Nobel laureate Professor Brian Schmidt.
The ANU's Ed Muthiah (an ANU engineering graduate), the Sol Invictus business manager, explains to us that the vehicle in the picture is the "conceptual design" of the team's electric vehicle (EV). He says the vehicle that, carrying our city's hopes, scampers between Darwin and Adelaide in October 2017 will be either exactly like this or very like it.
To an aesthete (like your columnist) the beautiful vehicle looks like an artwork but Muthiah says that EVs are largely determined by essential considerations of mass and aerodynamics. So they need to be "extremely streamlined", hence this EVs smooth and greyhoundish good looks.
The event is not strictly a race, he points out, but is instead "a research and innovation event". It is extremely intense and competitive in ways not dreamed of in mere racing events. So there is great rivalry, for cerebral prestige, between the universities and institutions that compete. The best engineering brains of the campuses apply themselves to their universities' entries. In this case, Muthiah rejoices, there will be a kind of whole-of-campus involvement by the ANU, with students of business, law, marketing and arts, as well as engineering, having parts to play.
One great excitement he feels, with the qualities and performances of the EVs' solar cells so vital (each team devises its own cells in secrecy) is that ANU is blessed with oodles of sophisticated solar cell expertise among its scholars. He thinks there is the exciting possibility that at the 2017 event the ANU's EV may really, truly shine, even against some famously competitive campuses (Stanford, MIT, University of Michigan, Cambridge, and toey Australian unis such as UNSW) and some teams rich in sponsorship money and/or assisted by the trade secrets of giants like Panasonic.
He notes that, at the moment, the ANU is the 19th-ranked university in the world and fancies that a jolly good Sol Invictus performance in the WSC would see the ANU boosted higher up the league table.
It would, too, be a feather in Canberra's cap (what a funny old expression that is, for has anyone worn a feather in their cap since Robin Hood gaily sported one in Sherwood?). Sol Invictus already has some assistance from the ACT government's CBR Innovation Network and the energetic Ed Muthiah (who in conversation comes across as someone with a kind of solar-powered inner dynamism) says he hopes to persuade the government to further smile upon the quest. After all, success would bring international honour and glory to a city that prides itself on its cleverness.
Driving the contraption would be such fun! In Mr Barr's position we would make our government's support conditional on our being allowed, as Chief Minister, to be one of our ACT EV's drivers (there has to be a team of drivers for the sprint takes about 75 hours).
Mr Barr will need to be the correct weight. Ed Muthiah explains that "it's not like a horse race where you choose the lightest jockey" but that every EV has to carry 80kg so that for example a 60kg driver must take an extra 20kg in his or her saddle bags. Muthiah thinks that the drivers, in keeping with the whole-of-campus ethos of the project, may turn out to be ANU students with proven aplomb at Go-Karting.
